It's amazing to see the gymnastics founders go to to come up with excuses for not doing direct sales and sticking with marketing instead.
It's amazing to see the gymnastics founders go to to come up with excuses for not doing direct sales and sticking with marketing instead.
Just write those cold emails or pick up the phone already.
Why is this top?
I'm not in anyway complaining that it is (actually the main point is spot on), i'd just be really interested to understand the algo that get's this to the top vs some of the lower ones that have a lot higher votes and are only a few hours different.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/944ersmn8vcqbv6/Screenshot 2019-01-28 14.20.58.png?dl=0
A screen shot of the way it was when I saw this.
It may be because his profile is well rounded and he’s an active contributor. Have you noticed the daily stand ups always seem to be close to the top?
Actually if you look at that screen shot that's exactly what I was wondering about. The standup was way down compared to this but this had 2 points 0 comments vs standup 6 points 24 comments with only 2 hours in the difference.
But now you mention #points #followers I could see that possibly making a difference and might explain things.
Hmm I was surprised as well - normally doesn't happen for me so I doubt that's it.
You'd have to ask Courtland to get a non-speculative answer, but I imagine it's one of:
Courtland or Channing boosting the post manually (they do this from time to time)
You following me, and the new algo prioritising recent posts from people you follow over strangers (ie maybe it isn't top for everyone)
Courtland liked my post - maybe his likes carry more weight
Something else - maybe the algo prioritises the new style of post over the old style (when you had to include a title etc). Maybe it being a very short post helps. No idea.
Thanks, some good thoughts there :)
Funny I'm coming from this from the other side. When we decided to grow our business, we went straight to outbound sales. But we realized that without an inbound marketing strategy, our sales folks didn't have a great support structure on how to talk about the service, to refer people to once they got warm leads. It's a hard road to simply concentrate on outbound without an inbound marketing strategy to back up the sales team.
The process of designing a marketing strategy is actually a good existential process where you really examine what you offer, what your value is, who your competition is, why people would want to hire you. It's super valuable.
I think that's a very good point.
My experience has been similar.
What I'm talking about is doing those very first initial sales where you're still working out if there is demand for your product and how you should even talk to customers about it.
Once you've done enough direct sales to be able to create compelling market content (ie know enough to overcome customer objections) then by all means it's time to build out other channels as well!
I guess it depends on your market, but I had zero success with cold calls (and even less with cold emails). Maybe I sucked at it - but honestly, I don't think so. I just think that some markets require organic/warm leads.
I'm not exactly sure where the line is between "excuses for avoiding direct sales" and "this customer channel is a waste of time", but I'm 100% certain that it exists.
That's interesting!
Mind me asking how many cold calls/emails you did?
I'm sure there are edge cases where cold outreach doesn't work, but I'm struggling to think of them. Maybe healthcare/security/government?
At least 100 of each, targeting legal types (anywhere from solo practitioners to legal managers).
E-mail open rates were around 20% (from memory - don't quote me on that) with zero responses.
When calling, at best I got a "sure, send through something through and I'll look at it", which I think is just the polite version of "sorry, not interested". Mostly the response was just "not interested".
I admit that we hadn't figured out product-market - but at the very least, I was still converting around 1/3 of warm leads to trials. To me, this indicates that cold outreach just isn't good for that type of customer.
Newsletter/landing page signups were converting too. Cold was just giving me absolute zip.
Interesting! I guess there will always be outliers.
Thanks for coming back and explaining.
Legal professionals do tend to be very careful with their time (after all, they know exactly what it's worth in $).
That said, I've seen cold outreach to small law firms work well in the recent past (albeit in Europe).
Agree. Am learning this the hard way. I read this advice when I started working on my product but just dismissed it. Turns out I should have listened to it in the first place.
I spent months trying the "landing page" approach to validation. I made zero dollars. I also wasted a lot of time building stuff for people that were never going to pay in the first place.
Then two weeks ago I started cold emailing people and charging them for a bare-bones version of what I'd created. Discarded literally all of the dev work I did the last four months. Everything. Instead of trying to sell a SaaS, I just started selling one-off reports and data files.
Have made a few hundred $s already and hope to get to $1K rev in the next two weeks. And I don't think I will write another line of production code until I get much more revenue than that.
Even the backend I built for simple order processing and stripe integration is gone. Turns out my customers don't pay for stuff online. They like to talk to someone, or at least email them, and get some customization done.
If someone pays you for something, and they pay you enough to cover the cost of making it, you have a validated idea. If that isn't the case, the idea isn't validated
In my situation I've never actually done it before so I don't have a way to quantify the rewards.